Leder Program Bridges Basic Science and Medical Education

Courtesy Connie Cepko Photo by Graham Ramsay Connie Cepko (top) will direct a new program for biomedical graduate students named in honor of Philip Leder (bottom).

This spring HMS’s graduate students in the biomedical sciences will have a new educational option: participating in the Leder Medical Sciences (LMS) Program, a course of study designed to bridge the gap between basic sciences and clinical research. The program is named in honor of Philip Leder, chair of the Genetics Department at HMS and the John Emory Andrus professor of genetics.

While the Longwood area is home to MD and DMD students as well as to PhD students, the two groups have little educational interaction, said Connie Cepko, HMS professor of genetics and director of LMS—and both the biomedical and the medical students are the worse for it.

The goal of the LMS program is to take advantage of the enormous opportunities PhD candidates have in this medical community and to bring together communities that normally do not interact,” said S. James Adelstein, LMS’s co-director and the Paul C. Cabot distinguished professor of medical biophysics at HMS.

This will be the second effort to build a program that bridges basic and clinical scholarship. The Markey Program, which ran from 1991 until 2000, helped graduate students gain a feeling for medical science and its culture through a rigorous immersion in medical education. Nicole Davis, a former Markey fellow and an HMS research fellow in genetics, explained that she entered the program because “being really curious about human biology and medicine and being at a medical school, I felt that there’d be a deficiency in my training as a scientist if I didn’t learn some of that.” She was not disappointed, calling her experiences with the program “among the best things that I did.” Although popular with students, the Markey Program ran out of funding, and there has been no organized curriculum since for addressing translational research or medical research for students who are not candidates for an MD or DMD degree.

The end of the Markey program did not stop graduate students from being interested in incorporating medical education into their studies. These students, said Franklin Bunn, co-director of LMS and former director of the Markey Program, “will share an interest in human biology, and many of them will orient their future research in terms of human disease.”

“This program really creates an opportunity for the basic science student to become familiar with the medical sciences, and more particularly, with medicine both as a scientific discipline and as a culture. We hope that knocks down some of the artificial barriers between these two modes of science.”

The LMS Program will have two elements: a fundamentals component and a clinical component. The fundamentals portion will cover the basics of human biology and disease, focusing on organ systems and diseases that are ripe for investigation and novel therapeutic approaches. As part of this component, students will be required to take courses in pharmacology, human pathology, and human pathophysiology, as well as two elective courses from a preselected list. The pathophysiology course was created for the program and will be co-directed by Julian Seifter, HMS associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Bunn, HMS professor of medicine at BWH, and will include field trips to clinical laboratories. “We’ll teach by example,” said Bunn. “It won’t be comprehensive, but it will be illustrative. It will give students a way of integrating a broad range of topics.” The classes in the fundamentals component will be open to all Harvard Integrated Life Sciences students.

The clinical component will familiarize students with the culture of medical research and practice. The program’s founders argue that there is a gap between the cultures of basic science and clinical medicine. “Currently, a typical PhD student would be unlikely to attend clinical conferences or seminars, to get to know medical students, or interact professionally with a physician, despite being embedded in a large, dynamic academic medical environment,” said Cepko.

The program will help students become acquainted with their peers’ environment. They will attend clinical conferences, participate in the Mentored Clinical Casebook program, and interact with scientists who work outside of the traditional basic science departments. The interactions consist of workshops, lectures, and a dinner series, all designed to expose students to careers at the interface between science and clinical medicine.

The Medical School is well-positioned for such a program. “HMS is special, even unique, in having such depth,” said Bunn. “We have a lot of faculty that make the bridge between mechanistic science and human disease.” As such, appropriate mentors can be found among the community’s researchers.

Teaching scientists about the nature of human disease and the culture of clinical practice can help science make the leap from lab research to healing. “One of the goals for basic science is to cure human disease,” said Cepko. Educating and nurturing translational researchers can only help in achieving that goal.

“This program really creates an opportunity for the basic science student to become familiar with the medical sciences, and more particularly, with medicine both as a scientific discipline and as a culture,” said Leder. “We hope that knocks down some of the artificial barriers between these two modes of science.”

There will be an informational session about the LMS Program for all who are interested in mid-October.

—Rebecca Tinkelman

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